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A leading Indian political figure has compared the deaths of upwards of 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, in communal riots more than a decade ago to running over a puppy.

"If a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful," asked Narendra Modi, chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, a region at the forefront of India's economic and industrial rise, in an interview with Reuters. "If something happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad."

Narendra Modi at the World Economic Forum in India (Wikipedia)

The dominant figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party, a powerful grouping with deeply Hindu roots, Modi intended the remark to show his feelings for the Muslims who died in riots that broke out in Gujarat in 2002. Often accused of failing to issue an apology for what happened, he noted that investigators named by India's supreme court had given him "a thoroughly clean chit," exonerating him from all blame.

The furor over Modi's remark, however, is one sign of the depth of the divisions in a society whose 1.2-billion-plus people include a Muslim minority of nearly 180 million. That's about as many as in the "Islamic Republic of Pakistan" that broke off from India, 80 percent Hindu, when they both gained independence from Britain in 1947. Communal strife at the time of "partition" killed more than one million people.

Modi's revealing comment came in the midst of bitter debate about that other great chasm in Indian life, a growing rich-poor gap marked by rising concentrations of wealth in densely overcrowded cities and deepening poverty in rural areas. Not surprisingly, Modi's party has been severely criticizing a "food security" bill that the long entrenched but often divided Congress Party is rushing through India's parliament in a massive effort to keep more than half the people from going hungry every day.

Modi's "puppy" remark puts him at the center of the debate since he's leading the BJP challenge to Congress Party rule and actually has an outside chance of becoming prime minister if his party does well in elections next year and the Congress flounders in division and incompetence. Nor is it certain that his comparison of the massacre of Muslims with the death of a puppy will cost him that much popularity since he draws his deepest support from a wellspring of Hindu extremism always sensitive to Muslim challenges, whether from India's own Muslims or from Pakistan or Bangladesh, formerly "East Pakistan," which broke off from Pakistan in 1971.

So "who is the real Modi -- Hindu nationalist leader or pro-business chief minister," was the final, most telling question in the Reuters interview. "I'm a Hindu nationalist because I'm a born Hindu," he said. He also cast himself as "progressive, development-oriented, workaholic" -- qualities India badly needs to compete seriously as an economic power. "There's no contradiction between the two," he insisted. "It's one and the same image."

Just as he will remain anathema to Muslims, so Modi faces the scorn of leaders of an impoverished majority that may not be strong enough to head off his bid for national power. His opposition to the food security bill may fortify his image as a pragmatist critical of schemes that are likely to founder in corruption while distracting from economic goals.

The whole "food security" program, if it penetrates the state and local levels, will sap more than one percent of the GDP with no guarantee that those who need the handouts will get more than a small percentage of what's intended.

The president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who served as prime minister for five years

English: Sonia Gandhi, Indian politician, president of the Indian National Congress and widow of former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. (Wikipedia)

after the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi, in 1984, has battled with Congress leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to put food security at the crux of Congress priorities. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991, two years after his party lost out in elections, and Sonia presumably has her eyes on the political star of their son Rahul, a member of parliament who may be in line to

continue the Gandhi dynasty.

The debate over food security gets at the heart of Indian life. It's difficult to listen to opposing arguments without appreciating both sides.

"Markets can ignore the hungry, but poor democracies cannot do so beyond a point," wrote Ashutosh Varshney, director of the India Initiative at Brown University's Watson Institute, in The Indian . "Food security is the price India's rising capitalism might have to pay for functioning in a low-income democracy."

Chetan Bhagat, a best-selling novelist, shot right back in The Times of India.